OpenSSL, Zlib, libyaml: Chef requires your version of Ruby to link to these
libraries

Ruby: To execute these cookbooks

Rubygems: To install Chef

If you are working from a minimal operating system, you must manually install
these dependencies. If you have your Linux distribution's Ruby installed, it
will probably "just work". You may jump to the cookbook directories and begin to
use them.

Repository Directories

This repository contains several directories, and each directory contains a README file that describes what it is for in greater detail, and how to use it for managing your systems with Chef. If you just want to get one cookbook to run on one server, you only need to care about the cookbooks and config directories.

If you use the ssl_cert task, change the values in the config/rake.rb file appropriately. These values were also used in the new_cookbook task, but that task is replaced by the knife cookbook create command which can be configured below.

The second config file, .chef/knife.rb is a repository specific configuration file for knife. If you're using the Opscode Platform, you can download one for your organization from the management console. If you're using the Open Source Chef Server, you can generate a new one with knife configure. For more information about configuring Knife, see the Knife documentation.